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Cottage Pudding (Eggless)
1 cup sugar 3 tablespoons melted butter 1 cup milk (See ½ 1/2 cup lemon peel 3 eggs 2 cups (heaping) Five Roses 3 teaspoons (heaping) cream of tartar flour 4 teaspoons (heaping) soda 1 teaspoon soda 3 teaspoons (heaping) ginger 2 teaspoons cream of tartar 2 teaspoons salt 2 teaspoons lemon extract Nutmeg and cinnamon to taste.
Bake in a pan about ½ hour. Add sliced apples if you like-quite an improvement. Any pudding sauce. 2 eggs
The text as printed is two recipes collided — an eggless cottage pudding and a ginger pudding beside it — with the column rules lost. Read it as a source document rather than a working formula, and reconstruct before you bake.
- The page is scrambledA recipe titled "Eggless" that calls for 3 eggs and then 2 eggs, and carries both 3 teaspoons and 2 teaspoons of cream of tartar, is almost certainly the product of a mangled two-column layout. The ginger, nutmeg, cinnamon and the larger soda figure most likely belong to a neighbouring recipe rather than to the cottage pudding, though the page itself does not tell us which.
- What the cottage pudding probably wasThe plausible core is 1 cup sugar, 3 tablespoons melted butter, 1 cup milk, 2 heaping cups flour, and a soda-plus-cream-of-tartar leavening with lemon extract for flavour. Any reconstruction is a guess; treat the quantities as unverified.
- Soda and cream of tartarThese two together are homemade baking powder, in a ratio of roughly 1 part soda to 2 parts cream of tartar by volume. The 4 heaping teaspoons of soda on this page cannot be right for two cups of flour — that much would taste soapy and turn the crumb yellow.
- "Heaping"An old heaping teaspoon or cup is meaningfully larger than a level one, perhaps half again as much. Modern recipes assume level measures, so heaping flour cups run 5-6 oz each rather than 4½.
- The salt and the lemon peelTwo teaspoons of salt is high for a sweet pudding of this size; half a cup of lemon peel is more than any cottage pudding wants. Both readings are suspect and likely belong to a larger recipe or a different column.
- Baked, not boiledThe instruction is simply to bake in a pan for about half an hour. The recipe specifies no oven temperature and no pan depth.
- ServingThe recipe closes with "Any pudding sauce": a hot vanilla, lemon or caramel sauce poured over while warm. Sliced apples are offered as an option, but the recipe does not say how or when they are added.
- YieldThe recipe gives no pan size or number of servings; two cups of flour would suit something in the region of an 8-inch square pan.
Cottage pudding is a piece of thrift dressed up as dessert: a plain butter cake baked in a pan and served warm under a sweet sauce, the sauce doing the work that richer batters would otherwise have to. It was a fixture of North American home cookery through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the "eggless" versions multiplied whenever eggs were dear or unavailable — chemically leavened with soda and cream of tartar in place of beaten eggs. The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Winnipeg and Montreal, built largely from recipes contributed by Canadian housewives who used the company's flour, which is why the same dish can appear several times over in slightly different hands. The state of this particular page is a reminder of how such books reach us: set in tight double columns, and easily scrambled when that text is transcribed.